“Vanity Fire And The Wolfe”‏

“Vanity can apply to both insecurity and egoism”. Taylor Swift

You had me several years ago When I was still quite naive. Well, you said that we made such a pretty pair And that you would never leave But you gave away the things you loved And one of them was me. I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee Clouds in my coffee, and… You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you Don’t you, don’t you?

“Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief”. Jane Austen

“Take one Wall Street tycoon, his Fifth Avenue mistress, a reporter hungry for fame, and make the wrong turn in the Bronx… then sit back and watch the sparks fly”.- The Bonfire of the Vanities Tagline – Tom Wolfe

The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 1990 film adaption of the novel by Tom Wolfe. Starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith.

“An outrageous story about greed, lust vanity in America”. The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tagline

“If you’re going to live in a whorehouse, there’s only one thing you can do: be the best damn whore around”.– The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe

Judge Leonard White: “Let me tell you what justice is. Justice is the law. And the law is man’s feeble attempt to lay down the principles of decency. Decency! And decency isn’t a deal, it’s not a contract or a hustle or an angle! Decency… decency is what your grandmother taught you. It’s in your bones!”

“Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man”. Robert Louis Stevenson

“The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing”.Michel de Montaigne

“Vanity Fair Mag”

Vanity Fair (British magazine), a weekly British society magazine, 1868-1914, famous for its caricatures. Subtitled “A Weekly Show of Political, Social and Literary Wares”, it was founded by Thomas Gibson Bowles, who aimed to expose the contemporary vanities of Victorian society.

The first issue appeared in London on 7 November 1868. It offered its readership articles on fashion, current events, the theatre, books, social events and the latest scandals, together with serial fiction, word games and other trivia.

“There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. ‘The Saturday Evening Post’ and ‘Collier’s’ both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now of course, information technology…the new way of killing time”. Tom Wolfe

Vanity Fair is a magazine of popular culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast. The present Vanity Fair has been published since 1983 and there have been editions for four European countries as well as the U.S. edition.

“We really care about photography at ‘Vanity Fair”. Graydon Carter

“Vanity Fame”

“The highest form of vanity is love of fame”.George Santayana

“Vanity can create a very cruel space for you if you don’t know how to manage it”.Lady Gaga

“The whole show business is built on ego, vanity, self-satisfaction, and it’s total crap to pretend it’s not”. George Michael

Tom Wolfe

“The surest cure for vanity is loneliness”. Tom Wolfe

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe (born March 2, 1931, in Richmond), known as Tom Wolfe, is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning his career as a reporter, he soon became one of the most culturally significant figures of the sixties after the publication of books such as “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (a highly experimental account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters)

and two collections of articles and essays, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. His first novel entitled“The Bonfire of the Vanities”, released in 1987, was met with critical acclaim and was a great commercial success.

“My entire career, in fiction or nonfiction, I have reported and written about people who are not like me”.Tom Wolfe

New Journalismwas a style of 1960s and 1970s news writing and journalism which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included works by himself, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Robert Christgau, Gay Talese and others. Articles in the New Journalism style tended not to be found in newspapers, but rather in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, CoEvolution Quarterly, Esquire, New York, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and for a short while in the early 1970s, Scanlan’s Monthly.

“Most people don’t read editorial pages. I think I must have been 40 before I even looked at an editorial page”. Tom Wolfe

“It’s not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives – lends verisimilitude to what you are doing – it’s that it feeds the imagination”. Tom Wolfe

Wolfe adopted the white suit as a trademark in 1962. Wolfe has said that the outfit disarms the people he observes, making him, in their eyes, “a man from Mars, the man who didn’t know anything and was eager to know

“I have never knowingly, I swear to God, written satire. The word connotes exaggeration of the foibles of mankind. To me, mankind just has foibles. You don’t have to push it!” Tom Wolfe

Wolfe is credited with introducing the terms “statusphere,” “the right stuff,” “radical chic,” “the Me Decade,” and “social x-ray“into the English lexicon.

“Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions. Tom Wolfe

He is sometimes credited with inventing the term “trophy wife”as well, but this is incorrect: he described emaciated wives as “X-rays” in his novelThe Bonfire of the Vanitiesbut did not use the term“trophy wife”.

“People complain about my exclamation points, but I honestly think that’s the way people think. I don’t think people think in essays; it’s one exclamation point to another”. Tom Wolfe

“It’s fortunate that I am a writer, because that has helped me understand the properties of words. They are what have made life complex. In the battle for status in the animal kingdom, power and aggressiveness have been all-important. But among humans, once they acquired speech, all that changed”.Tom Wolfe

“Pro-Vanity”

“It’s not vanity to feel you have a right to be beautiful. Women are taught to feel we’re not good enough, that we must live up to someone else’s standards. But my aim is to cherish myself as I am”. Elle Macpherson

“Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty”.Victor Hugo

“Vanity is a vital aid to nature: completely and absolutely necessary to life. It is one of nature’s ways to bind you to the earth”. Elizabeth Smart

Who’s the one who stole your fire Who will you run to now Who’s the one who stole the Light

“The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it’s an example of freedom from religion”.Tom Wolfe